While the Infowars Investors have been focused on attacking basic risk assessments in businesses under the guise of fighting the Evil ESG-loving "Woke Capitalists", the suit-and-tie-type climate disinformation operatives have been pushing at the local level, too.
In Arizona and Nevada, Southwest Gas got caught hiring social media influencers on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, while also trying to spend money they get from customers via rate hikes on things like $4,700 dinners with a $1,500 bar tab, and $1,600 for a 10-minute chair massage … and golf club membership.
Oh, and in 2020 they gave out $4,500 "donations" to the politicians pushing a bill to ban Arizona cities from issuing building codes that require cleaner, safer, climate-friendly appliances in new construction, keeping Arizonans dependent on dirty, expensive methane gas.
Unfortunately, that's not the only state where polluters are tying the hands of local municipalities, to prevent them from taking climate action.
A new report last week from the Center for Climate Integrity, co-authored and covered by Emily Sanders at ExxonKnews, describes how "a network of corporate special interests has mounted an attack on municipalities’ right to access the courts as a way of shielding Big Oil and other industries from having to pay."
The Chamber of Commerce published their "Mitigating Municipality Litigation" plan in 2019, that's "blatant in its goals and tactics," Sanders writes, "laying out specific bills that state legislatures can pass in order to restrict and eliminate legal avenues for local communities seeking justice from lawless corporate actors."
There are four types of bills proposed, that would prevent municipalities from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel (or tobacco, or opioid, or asbestos or lead) companies by changing details of how and when suits can be filed, and denying state courts' authority to hear certain types of cases (involving polluters).
The Big Business lobbying arm that is the US Chamber of Commerce is hardly alone, of course, and Sanders reports that they're "working with other national front groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to attack municipal litigation on multiple fronts."
"This network of front groups," Sanders explains, "honed its playbook while protecting Big Tobacco from legal liability, and has subsequently used the same strategies to ward off legal threats to countless other industries — including pharmaceuticals, asbestos, lead paint, and guns. The Chamber, NAM, ALEC, and a network of right-wing think tanks are part of a large web of organizations that also includes smaller, hard-to-track, dark money-funded groups with names that suggest high ideals, such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texans for Legal Reform, the American Tort Reform Association, and the Civil Justice Reform Group."
So far, they've gotten bills "introduced in Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Kansas, and one passed in Texas."
There is hope though, in that elected officials who actually care about the safety and wellbeing of their constituents can prevent or repeal these efforts, and join others to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its harms.